Rangoon​I was thrilled to arrive back in Rangoon, as I had enjoyed it so much when I was here with Jim last year. I stayed at the same Japanese-run guesthouse, ate at the Nepali restaurant, and patronized Nilar’s yoghurt (by-day) and whisky (by night) shop, (I only go during the day!). Downtown Rangoon is a chaotic mess of overcrowded belching buses, broken sidewalks, dilapidated colonial architecture and foul and delicious odors. Street vendors almost block the sidewalk hawking everything from ancient British-era textbooks to as-yet unreleased Hollywood DVDs. However, the item that fascinates me the most is the small mechanical people counter, you know the one with the button and the revolving numbers? Almost every hawker has one or two and some have several models to choose from. Who is buying these things? How many jobs involve counting to the degree that you need a counter that goes up to 999? How many entry level job starters are there in Rangoon that need to buy a new set of clothes, a little set of stacking stainless steel tins for their lunch and a brand new people counter? I sometimes feel I may go to my grave without cracking this particular enigma.

The ubiquitous people counters hold pride of place at the center of this street vendor's display.

Downtown Rangoon was laid out by the British during their colonial occupation from 1852 till 1947 and there are still many impressive Victorian buildings gently falling down from their former glory as physical expressions of British imperial will. But it is the people that impress most. At the time of Burmese independence in 1947, Rangoon was largely populated by migrants from India, some involuntary, but many seeking opportunity in a less competitive environment. Most left following Independence or in the purges after 1962. However, the remaining residents of Indian descent still dominate the street culture of downtown, with their restaurants, street stalls, tea houses, temples and mosques. There is, of course, a Chinatown, and that’s where I go to get my solar panels. Rangoon sits on a bend in the Yangon River, which can handle ocean-going ships and it still has many of the warehouses and go-downs from when Brittania ruled the waves. An odd connection for me is that during the colonial period, commerce in Burma was dominated by Scots. Steel Bros (Rice), The Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation (Timber), Burmah Oil and The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company were all in Glaswegian hands. It’s a city of glaring contrasts – if you raise your eyes to take in a gleaming new tower, you risk falling 6ft into an open sewer. As Paul Simon so aptly put it, we live in an era of lasers in the jungle!

One of the many colonial buildings in Rangoon, now mouldering, but soon to find a new lease on life as a hotel or a corporation HQ.

Note on spelling of place of names:In 1989 the government changed the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar and also the spellings of most of the major towns. Rangoon became Yangon, Bassein became Pathein, Moulmein became Mawlamyine etc. Most people inside the country use the new versions. While many opposing people outside the country use the old ones. In my blog I use both, according to familiarity, poetic resonance and whim. Actually, most names are really the same word, in the Burmese form and the romanized form. Bamar/Myanmar was changed to Burma by the Brits, it is the also the name for the Burman people and their language, but don’t get me started on these intricacies!

Sule Pagoda by night, during the Water Festival.

Recent Developments

​Burma is opening up its economy quickly to outside investment. Real estate development is booming. Previously, one had to have crisp, unfolded $100 bills and change them under the table at Scott Market. Now government banks exchange currency and today, I saw several ATMs being installed outside new banks from which they were just removing the plastic wrapping. Chinese money is pouring in, confidence is high that investments will be more secure than before, (not hard!). I just wonder what will happen to the people-counter vendors and the Indian street urchins amid all this? More (urban) jungle than laser for them, I fear. Rap music is huge, dyed hair is everywhere, and Burmese males follow the English Premier Football League as if their lives depended on the results. Thirty years ago, Burma was an isolated backwater, now it’s at the crossroads of Asia, poised between the two new giants, China and India. It is developing quickly, but the transnational corporations are circling, looking to exploit its abundant natural resources.

Yangon River. Rangoon on the right, hinterland on the left.

Pyin Oo Lwin

​My first scheduled training was in Pyin Oo Lwin, formerly called Maymyo, which was a garrison town and hill station during the colonial period. It’s still a garrison town and the weather is still pleasantly cool at around 3,300ft in altitude. There are quite a few vestiges of its previous occupants, like large brick Tudor-style villas, horse drawn buggies and a significant Nepalese population. It is the main supplier of cool weather vegetables and strawberries for the entire nation.

Some of the 1,000+ monks and novices who live at a monastery, just outside Pyin Oo Lwin.

I had visited St Mathew’s Orphanage Center (SMOC) last year, got on well with the director and agreed to return with a solar pump for their farm. This year, we started first with a Rocket stove training. The form was very similar to the training I did at Nu Po camp, (see above). We still didn’t have our brick firing technique down cold, so the bricks were more crumbly than was useful. However, we made some really pretty good looking stainless steel combustion chamber stoves that worked just fine. In these trainings I don’t offer the “perfect stove”, but rather, some new ideas and stove building principals that I hope participants will then use along with their own creativity to build stoves from local resources that will really suit their needs.

The Acme Stove Works (Asia) export model in action.

While we were waiting for the bricks to harden, we did a one-day introduction to Solar PV and then took the opportunity to visit the farm to install the solar water pump. The SMOC farm is 20 miles out of town along the old WW2 “Burma Road” to China, then 10 miles off-road through a devastated treeless landscape that was a forest less than 30 years ago. Pressure on land in this area has led to the wholesale cutting of all the forest as far as the eye can see. Being this close to China is a double-edged sword that cuts deep when your neighbor holds the hilt. On the farm they grow rice, wheat and vegetables for their own table and sell the surplus. The problem is that the all-year stream is 5ft below the level of their fields. Until now they have been carrying water in buckets to irrigate the crops – a back-breaking and time-consuming job. Enter the Shurflo pump and Solar Roots. I had already used this pump at Jim’s farm in Sangklaburi, so I knew it was up to the task – to lift the water from the stream and pump it 350ft horizontally, all day if necessary

This young man lives on the SMOC farm and will be responsible for the operation and maintenance of the solar pumping system.

Previously, we had made the one and a half hour trip to Mandalay to buy the solar panels and sundry materials. Along with the pump, I had brought a special controller from the US that optimizes the panel output to match the pump’s requirements. To make the system just perfect we installed the panels on a rotating mount, (built from plumbing parts), with which they can track the sun to squeeze every last gallon out of the available sunlight. The SMOC people are good Christian folks from Kachin State, but they have heard the Solar Gospel, and they saw that it was good!

On my day off, I had the good fortune to visit the only tea plantation in the area and a demonstration farm belonging to the Lisu Theological Seminary. The unfortunate thing that links these two properties is that the new controversial oil and gas pipelines headed for China, go right through them. At the tea plantation the manager insisted I take a packet of his export grade tea as a present, despite my attempts to pay. I thought ruefully about these California wineries where they charge you considerably more for a bottle of their wine than you would pay in your neighborhood supermarket. Just for the unique experience, you know!

The pipeline snaking its way from the Indian Ocean to Yunnan, China. There will be a second one for gas soon, and it is predicted a high speed rail line and a super highway too. Lasers, in what was once a jungle, but now is a devastated erosion zone.